Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday May 07, 2014 @02:08AM
from the year-of-the-accidental-dba dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: "Dice [note: our corporate overlord] collects a ton of data from job postings. Its latest findings? The number of jobs posted for NoSQL experts has risen 54 percent year-over-year, ahead of postings for professionals skilled in so-called 'Big Data' (up 46 percent), Apache Hadoop (43 percent), and Python (16 percent). Employers are also seeking those with expertise in Software-as-a-Service platforms, to the tune of 20 percent more job postings over the past twelve months; in a similar vein, postings for tech professionals with some cloud experience have leapt 27 percent in the same period. Nothing earth-shattering here, but it's perhaps interesting to note that, for all the hype surrounding some of these things, there's actually significant demand behind them."

Sure, the job may say "Python" or "PHP" in the title, but.... they usually want niche skills with some CMS you've never heard of written in these languages, and if you read the whole job writeup, it's not a "Python" job other than you need to know Python to write extensions for the CMS. So if you know Python programming, you still won't get the job.

The reason why there's a "shortage" of skills at the same time there's a glut of developers available is the insanely narrow specialization that companies want. There aren't many people who have even heard of the CMS-of-the-week the company uses, let alone knows its internals well enough to do what the company wants done. Companies seem very good at picking losers in the technology race, and get stuck with things that are evolutionary dead ends, further limiting their talent pool.

Big data is probably the same thing, but I don't know anything about it.